LILO

Hi, I had a problem with LILO, everytimes I've install Redhat 6.2 on this
hhd it did the same problem... My hdd partition has 2055 cylenders and
when I boot up the computer, it just prints "LI"...
Have any idear?

- Mathieu

[
This is the number one problem with LILO - it's a bit sensitive to some
matters of size and cylinder location. Matthieu here isn't the only one
who's had this question, it comes up several times every month, and has been
in the FAQ for a while. The number two problem is the same with some number
speewing at you.

Either usually means there is a geometry problem, and the right options can be
added to lilo.conf with any text editor. See LILO's own docs (usually in
/usr/doc/packages/lilo). Somewhat more usefully, the LILO Mini-Howto was
just updated a few days ago:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/LILO.html

I think you readers will also be pleased to know there are numerous
alternatives. You can find a stack of them by going to freshmeat.net and
typing "boot loader" or "bootloader" into its search box. (Do both seperately,
you get different lists.) Ones worth highlighting are GRUB, Smart Boot Manager,
GAG (it may be a slow link, but it looks really nice) and Winux (an odd one...
it's a configurator for using LOADLIN effectively). They don't seem to
mention Debian's 'mbr' - which (like Smart Boot Manager) is only a first
stage (you still need LILO or something like it to chain into the kernel) but
even less verbose than FreeBSD's spartan partition picker. You have to press
SHIFT if you care to change which partition to boot from.

Lastly, if after you install LILO, Windows/DOS won't boot even from a floppy,
boot from a rescue disk and use Linux fdisk to change your extended partition
type to 85 (linux extend). This will stop it from looking for a D: that
simply isn't there.

POP3 Login Problem... solved

I've searched high and low for a solution to this problem but haven't had
any luck.

I recently re-installed RH6.0 (after root was compromised by a non-malicious
hacker), and haven't done updated anything (yet) except my version of
XWindows.

Everything is more or less working, but I'm having difficulty logging into
my POP3 server. I have a perfectly valid and functioning user account, but
POP3 is rejecting my login (with the Linux account's password) with a "-ERR
Bad login" message.

Are there any circumstances where my POP3 server would be looking for a
different password than the OS? Or is there something else that could be
going on?

Thanks in advance for your assistance!

-Steve Lobo

But Steve found his answer and sent it in:

Nevermind! Not sure why, but the pop file didn't exist in /etc/pam.d- so
although everything looked to be in order in terms of connecting to port 110
attempting to get into a transaction state, POP had no idea about how to
authenticate. I just rebuilt imap* from my RH CDRoms and everything's
fine...

Thanks anyway!

Addendum to Tech FAQ 4 ("Where do I find help")

If you prefer reading HTML to plain text, the KDE help system (program
kdehelp) provides a nice interface to man pages (But of course it's supposed
to be used under the kdm display manager, not on a "dumb" console.) Either
type "man:<command>" (without the quotes and <&gt
into the URL line, or go
through the main menu. It also provides an interface to the other help
system (info pages) but less nicely formatted (you can type "info:<command>
invocation" into the URL line but in this case I think it's easier to
navigate the menu system).

Computer Tax Credits

Is there a program or programs that accept computer trade-in for
tax credit?

Joe Kellum-NYC

Probably.

I did a Google (http://www.google.com) search on the phrase
"computer donation tax" and got 35,000 hits. The first
several appeared relevant.

However, this has nothing to do with Linux or with the
free software movement. It's also not a technical question.
Thus you've posted it to the wrong venue.

Perhaps you should talk to a tax professional.

[ The real tip here is, we're the Linux
Gazette, not the tax writeoff gazette. You might try donating
it to the
Free Software Foundation, the
Debian project, or a developer who
is working on stuff your company uses, but is poor and could use the
particular hardware you have.
--Heather.]

A Question!

I want to connect a Laptop and a PC both running RedHat 6.2, through an
ethernet connection.
I do not need any technical details, I am aware of those. I have onlyone
question, which is can I use thin 10Base2 network without a hub to achieve
this?

Most laptop ethernet cards that I've seen use 10Base-T, or
twisted-pair, Ethernet. If you have this kind of Ethernet on
both systems -- it has an RJ-45 socket, like a wide version of
a phone jack -- then you can connect two, and only two, systems
with a crossover cable, available at any well-stocked computer
store. Or build your own crossover cable using the diagram at:
http://www.homepclan.com/cabcr20.jpg You'll need a tool called
an RJ-45 crimper, which is a good investment if you want to make
a lot of cables in custom lengths.

If you have true 10Base-2 Ethernet, which is rare these days, both
systems will have a BNC connector, which is round with two little pins
on the sides. Using 10Base-2 Ethernet, you can connect any number of
systems without a hub. You'll need a 10Base2 cable (which is a coaxial
cable, similar to what cable TV uses but different) a BNC "T" connector
for each system, and a BNC terminator for each end. All available at any
well-stocked computer store.

A couple questions

I'm a newbie Linux user, and I just have a couple questions about my newly
installed RedHat 6.0 system.

1. I'm trying to figure out how to run KDE from the console. Running startx
brings up either GNOME, Afterstep or FVWM and I can't switch to KDE from
any
of those. I don't want to use GDM, and I found a script called 'kde' on my
system, which of course doesn't work because the X server is not up. I
found
that 'X' was a symbolic link to my installed X server, and that brings up
the familiar gray background and mouse cursor. I tried just switching to a
console and running 'kde' again, hoping it would find the X server I just
started.

Use a text editor (eg emacs), to edit:
/etc/sysconfig/desktop

So that it now holds the string 'KDE' (excluding the quote marks of course)

Winmail.dat

Of course it would be unfair to single out Microsoft in this regard. I
don't like Netscape's "vcard" attachments any less obnoxious than
"winmail.dat" and I find Netscape's previously default behavior of
appending HTML formatted copies of the body text to all outgoing e-mail
to be almost as bad as appending .doc or other binary formats. (At least
I can read between the tags if I care to).

Netscape 4.72 (& 4.73?) still defaults to HTML mail, and vCards are an
open standard (http://www.imc.org/pdi) that I have found very useful.

I have a web application that, among other things, sends the user's
contact information to us via email. Adding these users to our address
book becomes almost trivial thanks to an Outlook add-in that imports
vCards. My application includes a vCard attachment with the message and
we can double-click to add the user to a shared contacts folder. We
could do something similar using Netscape, or any *nix mail client that
called GNOMECard as a vCard viewer if we were using *nix desktops.

As long as sending a vCard is not the mail client's default behavior, I
don't have a problem with it. It has more info than a plain sig, and
since it's actually plain text, it's just as human-readable as an
attached text file.

SuSe Linux and Micrsoft medialess OS

I have started playing around with SuSE Linux and am impressed with the product. I have been a died in the wool Microsoft user for
the last eight years. I have seen them step on a lot of folks and that is part of business. I have also put up with their mindless CD keys
that make a network administrators life miserable. Not copy protected is what it said on all of their software. That was until they
controlled the market now everything is copy protected.

But the latest rumor or plan that Microsoft has put me over the edge. I read the an article in the May 1, 2000 issue of INFO WORLD
that Microsoft now wants to jam a "medialess OS" down our throats. The article is entitled "Users find Microsoft's medialess anti
piracy play hard to swallow" explains their latest attempt to stop software piracy. This is it for me.

I have been an ardent supporter up till this. I want to convert to something else. The problems are my word, access and other apps
that use MS apps. Is there a way to continue to use these apps without Microsoft OS. Or is there a way to emulate win apps or is there
other apps that transparently use their files? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Well as one newbie to another, good luck, Star office will import and
save in most if not all the MS formats for office, personally I was
using Star office on my MS machine, so I know it works at least for
word, and excel, never used access or powerpoint, so cannot tell you how
well those work.

This issue with MS medialess OS? I had not heard anything about it, but
sure am glad I am switching over to Linx myself. Very tired of Micr$oft
and its games, was waiting until I had found the apps needed to switch
over and with the release of Coreal office for linux, I figured the
time was at hand. Now to convince my wife.....

I am looking over the stuff for development on the KDE platform, namely
the KDevelop IDE. If Microsoft would have developed something like this,
and gave it way, Windows would not be the mess it is. Alot more
developers would be able to work, without resorting to piracy to get the
tools needed.

USR Modem

I have a US robotics modem PCI Fax modem 3cp5610
and running Red Hat Linux. I can not get it to work. Any
suggestions ?

[ You are a very lucky guy - you actually have an
honest to goodness real modem there. So, you need to see what IRQ
it's getting, and if necessary use setserial to advise Linux' drivers to
keep it that way.

If you recompiled a kernel, double check that you have serial support.
Also, in the "extended dumb serial options" turn on IRQ sharing. People
who know modems a bit know that under MSwin 2 serial ports get the same
IRQ, but a different I/O address. Same here, if you tell it so.
--Heather.]

Boot Floppy for Linux

"I was wondering if you have ever heard of anyone booting up a system
with a linux boot floppy. The system previously lacks the ability to
boot from a CD , but after installing linux, uses the CD drive to
install another operating sytem which at teh same time will write over
the Linux system."

Noah:

Three different machines at work use boot floppies to start Linux. I
have had problems using LILO and modifying the boot sector on two of
those machines. Using a floppy gives me a safe and simple way to have
Linux and Windows on the same machine with no changes to the boot
sector. I did need to do an RDEV on the boot floppy's kernel to point
it toward the proper partition on the hard drive. Other than that minor
detail using a boot floppy works quite well.

Dave Sarraf

Diamond Stealth Pro VL and X -- A Contribution, I Hope

Hello, I have been playing with Linux for about 4 months, and I would
like to share some information that may already be available, but not
evident to me. My system has an older VESA local bus motherboard, and
the processor is a 486DX2 running at 66 MHz. It took me approximately 2
months to get Xfree86 working with my Diamond Stealth Pro VL (VESA local
bus) board which used an 80C929 device. Anyway, I want to prevent other
Linux people from pulling overnight hacks like I did (that will never
happen), so here is the section of the XF86Config file of importance for
a Diamond Stealth Pro VL video board (VL for VESA local bus).
------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------
My Linux distribution is SuSE 6.4. The parameters in the above file
reference the components in my video board.

The line which really made my system work without crashing while running
X was the Chipset directive. The default chipset was mmio_928. When
that option was used, I would get system hangs (you couldn't even
telenet via the ethernet), segmentation faults, and lots of other
problems. I will make the bold (and possibly incorrect) assumption that
the assumed memory locations (for memory mapped I/O) were in conflict
with the memory space of a running process (possibly kernel space?)
I do not know for sure, but, using s3_generic (which implies I/O mapping
for device registers) fixed the problem.

I am pleased that Linux came into
existance, and it is one of the ultimate hacks. Your Linux Gazette has
helped me lots and lots (I read all the back issues -- I am up to May
2000), and I hope that I can achieve the knowledge to help other people
the way your extensive documentation has helped me.

Chris Gianakopoulos
(soon to be Linux hacker)

ext2 fs question

James, I find your Linux Gazette column to be very valuable. I have a
problem that I have not been able to find the answer to: is it possible to
get NT/2000 to read ext2 partitions seamlessly? I found a utility which
will allow the user read-access but it is painfully slow and requires you to
copy anything you want Windows apps to be able to access:

locate

Somebody wrote a few days ago about how modern distributions have too
many files and it makes the "locate" command unusable. Because anything
you type matches a whole slew of pixmap and HTML files used for the
desktop interface. The person was asking the distributions to move
these into tar files.

Another strategy is just to filter those filenames out of the "locate"
output:

loc () {
locate "$1" | egrep -v 'bmp|html|whatever'
}

This creates a shell function called loc, so that when you type:

$ loc time

you don't get back entries containing 'bmp', 'html' or 'whatever'.
You can of course adjust the egrep expression to your heart's content.

Return to spellcheck

In regards to spellchecking for homonyms, I have built a web search
spellchecker at http://www.searchspell.com. It is a lookup database of
misspellings using ePerl and MySQL on a Linux box. It allows me to
customize spelling rules for particular rules, and even recommend possible
corrections to words with correct spellings ("hear" for "here", "where"
for "wear", etc.) Before reading your column I did not have "hoard" and
"horde" in my database, but that is now fixed, and I'm tracking down more
and more everyday.

Currently my database has over 2,000,000 entries, which I'm able to
permute in billions of typo corrections, and each day I'm getting closer
to a true "intelligent" spellchecking system.

If you have some spare time, please check it out.

Regards,
Joe Petrow

redhat ifup/ifdown problems

I'm having some trouble with allowing regular users to control the
ppp0 connection. I even enabled "Allow any user (de)active the
interface" under netconf. Essentially what happens is the user types in
"ifup ppp0" or "ifdown ppp0" and it sits there without ever doing
anything. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

[
You could install mserver, then let the users have a
masqdialer client each;
they even exist for Windows. But the question is still a good one;
why does this hang?
--Heather.]

Also, would you happen to know of a Linux help site that is in
message board format?

Thanks.
-Dan

Tips in the following section are answers to questions printed in the Mail
Bag column or comments on AnswerGuy mail from previous issues.

ANSWER: grep

Hi Angus:
The quickest, easiest way to do what you want is just to extend your
expression a bit...

finger | grep 'potatoe '
<instead of>
finger | grep potatoe

Note that I added the quotes, with the trailing space. This will match
all instances of "potatoe" with a trailing space (for example, a
username). However, hostnames (potatoe.onthefarm.com) won't match because
of the trailing ".".

You could use 'awk' to do whatever you want to (currently
I am not in a mood to dig an awk script, it's been long!)

Also look into 'cut' command where you can cut fields
of a multi-column line, which also could be used
to do some tricky things.

As advice, learn about regular expressions in *nix. The
first solution above, used the '^' symbol to indicate to
grep to get the lines starting with potato. You could do
many such things with regular expressions...

ANSWER: File formats!!!

There are definitely well defined file formats.
If you are looking for Windows/Dos, the file formats
are .COM and .EXE. To get to know about these formats
refer to any standard assmbly language book, like
"Introduction to assmbley languge" (not sure about the title)
by Peter Norton and Socha.

In *nix world there are two famous execution file
formats(AFAIK),
"a.out" and "elf (Executable and Linking Format)".
"a.out" is a little old standard and Linux came out of that
format sometime back. elf is a old but very generic and good
one.

There is a standards document somewhere which defines the
format of an elf file. Even you could try 'man elf' and
it could tell you something.

In short, elf file contains a number of sections,
one for each of constant-data, un-initialized data,
executable code, startup-code and debug-info tables.

May be if you look at programs like objdump or elf library
(libelf.o) related header files, you would get interesting
things.

ANSWER: KPPP Question

I hope you've gotten your question posted at Linux
Gazette answered by now (six weeks later), but in case
not, here are some suggestions:

In the KPPP Setup dialogue, under the IP Address tab
there's a box "configure hostname automatically";
*un-check* this box.

KPPP does indeed edit /etc/resolve.conf, but if (under
the DNS tab in Setup) you do not check the box
"disable existing DNS servers" then your default DNS
server (e.g., your local caching DNS server, if you've
set one up) should also work, and will be tried before
your ISP's DNS server is consulted.

Again, I hope this is not helpful (i.e., that you've
already gotten things working again
.

adh

ANSWER: about stripping libraries

Hi,
when you strip a library with strip or objcopy --strip-all you
don't wipe out the dynamic symbol table, this mean that static
libraries become useless but when you strip a dynamic library you don't
loose dynamic symbols (have a look with nm -D or objdump -T on your
stripped library) and so library functions can be still referenced

ANSWER: Intel i810

Searching for more inormation about the i810 chipset I came across
your discussion about it and Linux.

I had a similar porblem with my Linux installation, where as Linux installed
fine and I could utilize the command line wihtout a problem. However I had no
graphics support, that is to say no XFree86.

The soultion to this porblem is to be found at support.intel.com, under the
i810 fourm site. They have the X server and Kernel module and complete
instrcutions for how to install and use the software. You must however read
the fourm posts as there are a few tricks to the setup procedure.

That being said, I would like to know when/if kernel support will be provided
for the i810 chipset. Actually I would rather learn how to find this
information for myself. If you teach a man to fish, etc....

Thanks,
GregV

[ Xfree86 is a userspace application; the kernel is only
involved a tiny bit for video (unless you use framebuffer, then
kernel space is doing a lot of the work). A good way to search
is to download a current kernel source package from
kernel.org, install it, and
grep around in its Documentation/ directory. You can also give
keywords you find here (like "AGP" "framebuffer" etc.) to normal
search engines like the Gazette's own, or Google!
-- Ed.]

ANSWER: fsck

When you run fsck (or e2fsck) on a filesystem, it is
very important that the filesystem be mounted
read-only; otherwise fsck will do further (possibly
severe) damage to the filesystem being checked.

As you may know, Linux stores data in RAM buffers, so
when there's a sudden power-out, a lot of data about
the running system is lost. However, unless the power
goes out while you're booting, I don't think you
should lose configuration files like inetd.conf.
That's what makes me suspect that fsck was run on a
read-write filesystem.

Recent kernels (2.2.14 or later, say) are better about
syncing RAM buffers to the disk every minute or so (so
less data is lost in a crash), and ext3 (the new
filesystem type) handles crashes better than ext2 (in
theory

About desktop applications, KDE allows you to add
executable icons on your desktop; right click on the
desktop and select "New Application" in the dialogue
box that pops up, then fill in information as
directed. You should have a couple of clock programs,
such as "xclock", "oclock", perhaps even "daliclock"
(perhaps this is a GNOME program...?).

ANSWER: linux crash

You may have a bad sector. I had a bad sector in the inode area, and every so
often a file would land there and cause havoc. The worst was when /etc/mtab
landed on the bad inode. The computer couldn't tell what was mounted and
refused to boot. I fixed it with fsck -c .

phma

ANSWER: Port forwarding

Regarding your June 15 post at Linux Gazette, you
might swing the desired arrangement with port
forwarding on the proxy server (ipportfw, one of the
IP masquerading utilities), but it may not be easy
(read: impossible if you don't have root access on the
proxy, merely difficult otherwise). I'm pretty sure
it's impossible if the proxy is also accepting HTTP
connections on port 80, since you can't (to my
knowledge) run two services on the same port.

Even if the technicalities can be overcome, there are
good reasons not to allow telnet connections through
your proxy firewall's www port:

Your employer is presumably monitoring all network
activity, and may not appreciate having the firewall
breached (or circumvented, if you prefer).

It makes the firewall and the network behind it
more vulnerable to attack (because it complicates the
routing rulesets, opens another port/service, etc,
etc).

Telnet sends clear text passwords, and should not
be used for any reason over a non-private network; ssh
(secure shell) is a no-cost, open source, encrypted
replacement, and is very easy to compile and install
(again, if you have root access).

(That's just off the top of my head...I'm confident
there are other good reasons

Well, not to lecture, but it sounds like a bad idea to
me. More positively, I think you'd do better to
convince your employer to run an SSH server inside the
firewall, and/or to allow outgoing SSH connections.

Sincerely,
adh

ANSWER: re: linux booting

I have run into the problem you are describing. I added a SCSI card to
my machine which hosed Win95. I never did get Win95 working but I kept
hosing my boot sector trying to reinstall it. The solution is really
pretty simple.

Obtain a boot disk. If you don't have one, you can make one from
linux by typing (as root)
mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 <kernel version #>

This will save you some time, copy down the information from
/etc/fstab related to your hard disk partitions. When you boot from the
floppy, nothing will be mounted for you. You have to do it manually.

Boot from the floppy and type "rescue" at the lilo prompt.

Now you are in a minimal linux environment. You won't have all the
nifty commands but that's okay. You need to mount your / partition and
possibly other partitions if /etc, /sbin, /boot and possible /usr and/or
/usr/local.

chroot /, this isn't strictly necessary but the other way is much
harder.

run /sbin/lilo. That should rewrite the boot sector and allow you to
boot with lilo.

I wrote this from memory so I may have left out a step or two but I hope
this will give you the idea.

Jim

ANSWER: Anyone out there know more?

I think either objcopy or strip can be used. However, the Linux
Bootdisk HOWTO says that only debug symbols should be removed
(--strip-debug). What would happen if everything is removed
(--strip-all)? I have tried and the resulting boot/root disk seems to
be OK. However, something must be wrong ...

P>
I found this out after some hair-pulling exercise. Some distributions
have a "depmod -a" in the initialisation scripts. This uses the
object symbols to resolve the dependances between modules. If you strip
all, depmod cannot resolve and hence cannot work out that whenever you
load sound.o you will also need to load sb.o.

If your bootdisk already has a depmod, then I suppose you can strip-all
to save space. There maybe other reasons why you shouldn't do a
strip-all that I don't know about.

chimera

ANSWER: Linux Voice Mail, etc.

I saw a post by you on the Linux Gazzette about Voice Mail, E-Mail, Faxes,
etc. integrated on Linux. You said it was possible via scripts, but you did
not cite any examples of software to use to do this.

I have seen mgetty+sendfax but it is not ready for prime-time and won't work
with but a few voice modems, and even still, doesn't always work and is in
the beta test stage.

Do you know of any open-sourced, shareware, freeware, or commercial Linux
solutions that do all of this that costs under $200 if commercial?

Thanks.

[
You could certainly try HylaFax, it is open source and absolutely free.
Specifically, the fellow who wrote it works at SGI, and they let him
give it away, as long as they get to disclaim everything and not be
involved in it. So check out http://www.hylafax.org right away

There are probably others, I'm sure we'll get notes about it now.
--Heather.]